The Slave Power or Slaveocracy was the perceived political power in the U.S. federal government held by slave owners during the 1840s and 1850s, prior to the Civil War. Antislavery campaigners during this period bitterly complained about what they saw as disproportionate and corrupt influence wielded by wealthy Southerners. The argument was that this small group of rich slave owners had seized political control of their own states and were trying to take over the federal government in an illegitimate fashion in order to expand and protect slavery. The argument was widely used by the Republican Party that formed in 1854–55 to oppose the expansion of slavery.

The main issue expressed by the term slave power was distrust of the political power of the slave-owning class. Such distrust was shared by many who were not abolitionists; those who were motivated more by a possible threat to the political balance or the impossibility of competing with unwaged slave labor, than by concern over the treatment of slaves. Those who differed on many other issues (such as hating blacks or liking them, denouncing slavery as a sin or promising to guarantee its protection in the Deep South) could unite to attack the slaveocracy.[1] The "Free Soil" element emphasized that rich slave owners would move into new territory, use their cash to buy up all the good lands, then use their slaves to work the lands, leaving little opportunity room for free farmers. By 1854 the Free Soil Party had largely merged into the new Republican party.[2]

The existence of a Slave Power was dismissed by Southerners at the time, and rejected as false by many historians of the 1920s and 1930s, who stressed the internal divisions in the South before 1850.[4] The idea that the Slave Power existed has partly come back at the hands of neoabolitionist historians since 1970, and there is no doubt that it was a powerful factor in the Northern anti-slavery belief system. It was standard rhetoric for all factions of the Republican party.[5]

The problem posed by slavery, according to many Northern politicians, was not so much the mistreatment of slaves (a theme that abolitionists emphasized), but rather the political threat to American republicanism, especially as embraced in Northern free states. The Free Soil Party first raised this warning in 1848, arguing that the annexation of Texas as a slave state was a terrible mistake. The Free Soilers rhetoric was taken up by the Republican party as it emerged in 1854.

The Republicans also argued that slavery was economically inefficient, compared to free labor, and was a deterrent to the long-term modernization of America. Worse, said the Republicans, the Slave Power, deeply entrenched in the South, was systematically seizing control of the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. Senator and governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio was an articulate enemy of the Slave Power, as was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.

Southern power derived from a combination of factors. The "three-fifths clause" (counting 100 slaves as 60 people for seats in the House and thus for electoral votes) gave the South additional representation at the national level.[6] Parity in the Senate was critical, whereby a new slave state was admitted in tandem with a new free state. Regional unity across party lines was essential on key votes. In the Democratic party, a presidential candidate had to carry the national convention by a two-thirds vote to get nominated. It was also essential for some northerners—"Doughfaces"[7]—to collaborate with the South, as in the debates surrounding the three-fifths clause itself in 1787, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the gag rule in the House (1836–1844), and the wider subject of the Wilmot Proviso and slavery expansion in the Southwest after the Mexican war of 1846–1848.[8] However, the North was adding population—and House seats—much faster than the South, so the handwriting was on the wall. With the implacable Republicans gaining every year, the secession option became more and more attractive to the South. Secession was suicidal, as some leaders realized—and as John Quincy Adams had long prophesied. Secession, argued James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, reminded him of "the Japanese who when insulted rip open their own bowels." And yet when secession came in 1860 Hammond followed. Historian Leonard Richards concludes, "It was men like Hammond who finally destroyed the Slave Power. Thanks to their leading the South out of the Union, seventy-two years of slaveholder domination came to an end."[9]

From the point of view of many Northerners, the supposedly definitive Compromise of 1850 was followed by a series of maneuvers (such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, etc.) in which the North gave up previously-agreed gains without receiving anything in return, accompanied by ever-escalating and more extreme Southern demands. Many northerners who had no particular concern for blacks concluded that slavery was not worth preserving if its protection required destroying or seriously compromising democracy among whites. Such perceptions led to the Anti-Nebraska movement of 1854–1855, followed by the organized Republican Party.

Historian Frederick J. Blue (2006) explores the motives and actions of those who played supportive but not central roles in antislavery politics—those who undertook the humdrum work of organizing local parties, holding conventions, editing newspapers, and generally animating and agitating the discussion of issues related to slavery. They were a small but critical number of voices who, beginning in the late 1830s, battled the institution of slavery through political activism. In the face of great odds and powerful opposition, activists insisted that emancipation and racial equality could only be achieved through the political process. Representative activists include: Alvan Stewart, a Liberty party organizer from New York; John Greenleaf Whittier, a Massachusetts poet, journalist, and Liberty activist; Charles Henry Langston, an Ohio African American educator; Owen Lovejoy, a congressman from Illinois, whose brother was killed by a pro-slavery mob; Sherman Booth, a journalist and Liberty organizer in Wisconsin; Jane Grey Swisshelm, a journalist in Pennsylvania and Minnesota; George W. Julian, a congressman from Indiana; David Wilmot, a congressman from Pennsylvania whose Wilmot proviso tried to stop the expansion of slavery in the Southwest; Benjamin Wade and Edward Wade, a senator and a congressman, respectively, from Ohio; and Jessie Benton Frémont of Missouri and California, wife of the Republican 1856 presidential nominee John C. Frémont.[10]

The Democrats who rallied to Martin Van Buren's Free Soil Party in 1848 have been studied by Earle (2003). Their views on race occupied a wide spectrum, but they were able to fashion new and vital arguments against slavery and its expansion based on the Jacksonian Democracy's long-standing commitment to egalitarianism and hostility to centralized power. Linking their antislavery stance to a land-reform agenda that pressed for free land for poor settlers—realized by the Homestead Law of 1862—in addition to land free of slavery, Free Soil Democrats forced major political realignments in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Democratic politicians such as Wilmot, Marcus Morton, John Parker Hale, and even former president Van Buren were transformed into antislavery leaders. Many entered the new Republican party after 1854, bringing along Jacksonian ideas about property and political equality, helping transform antislavery from a struggling crusade into a mass political movement that came to power in 1860.[11]

The only solution, Republicans insisted, was a new commitment to free labor, and a deliberate effort to stop any more territorial expansion of slavery. Northern Democrats answered that it was all an exaggeration and that the Republicans were paranoid. Their Southern colleagues spoke of secession, arguing that the John Brown raid of 1859 proved that the Republicans were ready to attack their region and destroy their way of life.

In congratulating President-elect Lincoln in 1860, Salmon P. Chase exclaimed, "The object of my wishes and labors for nineteen years is accomplished in the overthrow of the Slave Power", adding that the way was now clear "for the establishment of the policy of Freedom"—something that would come only after four destructive years of Civil War.[13]

Jessie Fremont, the wife of the first Republican presidential candidate, wrote campaign poetry for the 1856 election. Grant says her poems bind the period's cult of domesticity to the new party's emerging ideology. Her poems suggested that Northerners who conciliated the Slave Power were spreading their own sterility, while virile men voting Republican were reproducing, through their own redemption, a future free West. The code of domesticity, according to Grant, thus helped these poems to define collective political action as building upon the strengths of free labor.[14]

Historian Henry Brooks Adams (grandson of "Slave-Power" theorist John Quincy Adams) explained that the Slave Power was a force for centralization:[15]

Between the slave power and states' rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states' rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas "by joint resolution" [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision—all triumphs of the slave power—did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states' rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states' rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.

Ashworth, John. "Free Labor, Wage Labor, and Slave Power: Republicanism and the Republican Party in the 1850s," in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880, edited by S. M. Stokes and S. Conway (1996), 128–46.

1.
Child labour
–
This practice is considered exploitative by many international organisations. Legislation across the world prohibit child labour, Child labour has existed to varying extents, through most of history. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, many children aged 5–14 from poorer families still worked in Europe and these children mainly worked in agriculture, home-based assembly operations, factories, mining and in services such as news boys. Some worked night shifts lasting 12 hours, with the rise of household income, availability of schools and passage of child labour laws, the incidence rates of child labour fell. In developing countries, with poverty and poor schooling opportunities. In 2010, sub-saharan Africa had the highest incidence rates of child labour, worldwide agriculture is the largest employer of child labour. Vast majority of labour is found in rural settings and informal urban economy, children are predominantly employed by their parents. Poverty and lack of schools are considered as the cause of child labour. Globally the incidence of child labour decreased from 25% to 10% between 1960 and 2003, according to the World Bank. Nevertheless, the number of child labourers remains high, with UNICEF. Child labour forms a part of pre-industrial economies. In pre-industrial societies, there is rarely a concept of childhood in the modern sense, Children often begin to actively participate in activities such as child rearing, hunting and farming as soon as they are competent. In many societies, children as young as 13 are seen as adults, the work of children was important in pre-industrial societies, as children needed to provide their labour for their survival and that of their group. In pre-industrial societies, there was little need for children to attend school and this is especially the case in non literate societies. Most pre-industrial skill and knowledge were amenable to being passed down through direct mentoring or apprenticing by competent adults, with the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late 18th century, there was a rapid increase in the industrial exploitation of labour, including child labour. Industrial cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool rapidly grew from small villages into large cities and these cities drew in the population that was rapidly growing due to increased agricultural output. This process was replicated in other industrialising counties, the Victorian era in particular became notorious for the conditions under which children were employed. Children as young as four were employed in factories and mines working long hours in dangerous, often fatal

2.
Children in the military
–
Throughout history and in many cultures, children have been extensively involved in military campaigns even when such practices were against cultural morals. In World War I, in Great Britain 250,000 boys under 18 managed to join the army, in World War II, child soldiers fought throughout Europe, in the Warsaw Uprising, in the Jewish resistance, and in the Soviet Army. According to one study, children have been used militarily across the globe, Children are easy targets to recruit for military purposes because of their vulnerability to influence. Many are seized and recruited by force whereas others join to escape their reality, research shows that child soldiering prolongs the duration of civil wars, as it increases the strength of rebel organizations vis-a-vis the government. This reduction in both the calibre of infantry rifles and the mass of many items of equipment makes it easier for children to carry. However, children who are over the age of 15 but under the age of 18 are still able to take part in combat as soldiers. The United Nations Security Council convenes regularly to debate, receive reports, the most recent meeting was on 17 July 2008. The first resolution on the issue, Resolution 1261, was passed in 1999, in 2014, more than 17 cases were covered about children in armed conflict. Many children in different countries are involved in such illegal conflicts and these children are detained with no real evidence, or in massive sweeps. Some of them are captured with their families, or by the activity of one of their family members, lawyers and relatives are banded to the court. They can be detained without sufficient food, medical care, or under other inhumane conditions, some of these children live with physical and sexual torture. Refraining from recruiting children under fifteen does not exclude children who volunteer for armed service, non-state actors and guerrilla forces are forbidden from recruiting anyone under the age of 18 for any purpose. Opinion is currently divided over whether children should be prosecuted for committing war crimes, many child soldiers fought in the Sierra Leone Civil War. In its wake, the UN sanctioned the Special Court for Sierra Leone to try the participants for war crimes, if found guilty under US law such a crime carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. This was agreed as part of a bargain, which would see Khadr deported to Canada after one year to serve the remaining seven years there. In a letter to the U. S. Omar Khadr remained in Guantanamo Bay, Khadr was transferred to the Canadian prison system in September 2012, and was freed on bail by a judge in the province of Alberta in May 2015. He is appealing his American conviction as a war criminal, in March 2012 Thomas Lubanga Dyilo was convicted by the International Criminal Court for military use of children. P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution estimated in January 2003 that child soldiers participate in three quarters of all the ongoing conflicts in the world

3.
Conscription
–
Conscription, or drafting, is the compulsory enlistment of people in a national service, most often a military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in countries to the present day under various names. The modern system of national conscription for young men dates to the French Revolution in the 1790s. Most European nations later copied the system in peacetime, so that men at a certain age would serve 1–8 years on active duty and those conscripted may evade service, sometimes by leaving the country. As of the early 21st century, many no longer conscript soldiers. The ability to rely on such an arrangement, however, presupposes some degree of predictability with regard to both war-fighting requirements and the scope of hostilities, many states that have abolished conscription therefore still reserve the power to resume it during wartime or times of crisis. Around the reign of Hammurabi, the Babylonian Empire used a system of conscription called Ilkum, under that system those eligible were required to serve in the royal army in time of war. During times of peace they were required to provide labour for other activities of the state. In return for service, people subject to it gained the right to hold land. It is possible that this right was not to hold land per se, various forms of avoiding military service are recorded. While it was outlawed by the Code of Hammurabi, the hiring of substitutes appears to have practiced both before and after the creation of the code. Later records show that Ilkum commitments could become regularly traded, in other places, people simply left their towns to avoid their Ilkum service. Another option was to sell Ilkum lands and the commitments along with them, with the exception of a few exempted classes, this was forbidden by the Code of Hammurabi. The levies raised in this way fought as infantry under local superiors, although the exact laws varied greatly depending on the country and the period, generally these levies were only obliged to fight for one to three months. Most were subsistence farmers, and it was in everyones interest to send the men home for harvest-time, the bulk of the Anglo-Saxon English army, called the fyrd, was composed of part-time English soldiers drawn from the landowning minor nobility. These thegns were the aristocracy of the time and were required to serve with their own armour. Medieval levy in Poland was known as the pospolite ruszenie, the system of military slaves was widely used in the Middle East, beginning with the creation of the corps of Turkish slave-soldiers by the Abbasid caliph al-Mutasim in the 820s and 830s. In the middle of the 14th century, Ottoman Sultan Murad I developed personal troops to be loyal to him, the new force was built by taking Christian children from newly conquered lands, especially from the far areas of his empire, in a system known as the devşirme

4.
Penal labour
–
Penal labour is a generic term for various kinds of unfree labour which prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context, forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios, labour as a form of punishment, the system used as a means to secure labour. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, large-scale implementations of penal labour include labour camps, prison farms, penal colonies, penal military units, penal transportation, or aboard prison ships. Punitive labour, also known as labour, prison labour. Punitive labour encompasses two types, productive labour, such as work, and intrinsically pointless tasks used as primitive occupational therapy. Sometimes authorities turn prison labour into an industry, as on a farm or in a prison workshop. On the other hand, for example in Victorian prisons, inmates commonly were made to work the treadmill, in some cases, similar punishments included turning the crank machine or carrying cannonballs. Semi-punitive labour also included oakum-picking, teasing apart old tarry rope to make caulking material for sailing vessels, section 1 of the Penal Servitude Act 1891 makes provision for enactments which authorise a sentence of penal servitude but do not specify a maximum duration. It must now be subject to section 1 of the Criminal Justice Act 1948. Sentences of penal servitude were served in prisons and were controlled by the Home Office. After sentencing, convicts would be classified according to the seriousness of the offence of which they were convicted, first time offenders would be classified in the Star class, persons not suitable for the Star class, but without serious convictions would be classified in the intermediate class. Habitual offenders would be classified in the Recidivist class, care was taken to ensure that convicts in one class did not mix with convicts in another. Penal servitude included hard labour as a standard feature, notable recipients of hard labour under British law include Oscar Wilde and John William Gott. In Inveraray Jail from 1839 prisoners worked up to ten hours a day, most male prisoners made herring nets or picked oakum, those with skills were often employed where the skills could be used, such as shoemaking, tailoring or joinery. Female prisoners picked oakum, knitted stockings or sewed, forms of labour for punishment included the treadmill, shot drill, and the crank machine. Prisoners had to six or more hours a day, climbing the equivalent of 5,000 to 14,000 vertical feet. While the purpose was mainly punitive, the mills could have used to grind grain, pump water

5.
Wage slavery
–
Wage slavery refers to a situation where a persons livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. The United States abolished slavery after the Civil War, but labor union activists found the metaphor useful, according to Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded Age, References abounded in the labor press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the phrase. The introduction of labor in 18th century Britain was met with resistance. Historically, some organizations and individual social activists have espoused workers self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor. The view that working for wages is akin to slavery dates back to the ancient world, in 1763, the French journalist Simon Linguet published a description of wage slavery, The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him. They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market. It is the impossibility of living by any means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. What effective gain the suppression of slavery brought He is free, the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger, the view that wage work has substantial similarities with chattel slavery was actively put forward in the late 18th and 19th centuries by defenders of chattel slavery, and by opponents of capitalism. Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states argued that Northern workers were free but in name – the slaves of endless toil, and that their slaves were better off. In this period, Henry David Thoreau wrote that t is hard to have a Southern overseer, it is worse to have a Northern one, some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious. They believed that workers were neither wronged nor oppressed. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, now I am my own master, no more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner, self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition slowly disappeared in the later part of the 19th century. In 1869 The New York Times described the system of labor as a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South

6.
History of slavery
–
The history of slavery spans nearly every culture, nationality, and religion from ancient times to the present day. However the social, economic, and legal positions of slaves were vastly different in different systems of slavery in different times and places, Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations, as it is developed as a system of social stratification. Slavery was known in the very oldest civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia which dates back as far as 3500 BC, the Byzantine–Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe resulted in the taking of large numbers of Christian slaves. Slavery became common within much of Europe and the British Isles during the Dark Ages, the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Arabs and a number of West African kingdoms played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade, especially after 1600. During the 1983–2005 Second Sudanese Civil War people were taken into slavery, evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic slavery in cacao plantations in West Africa, see the chocolate and slavery article. Evidence of slavery predates written records, and has existed in many cultures, however, slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations. Mass slavery requires economic surpluses and a population density to be viable. Due to these factors, the practice of slavery would have only proliferated after the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution, about 11,000 years ago. Such institutions were a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, French historian Fernand Braudel noted that slavery was endemic in Africa and part of the structure of everyday life. During the 16th century, Europe began to outpace the Arab world in the export traffic, the Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony in South Africa. In 1807 Britain, which extensive, although mainly coastal, colonial territories on the African continent, made the international slave trade illegal. In Senegambia, between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved, in early Islamic states of the Western Sudan, including Ghana, Mali, Segou, and Songhai, about a third of the population was enslaved. In Sierra Leone in the 19th century about half of the population consisted of slaves. In the 19th century at least half the population was enslaved among the Duala of the Cameroon, the Igbo and other peoples of the lower Niger, the Kongo, among the Ashanti and Yoruba a third of the population consisted of slaves. The population of the Kanem was about a third slave and it was perhaps 40% in Bornu. Between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the population of the Fulani jihad states consisted of slaves. The population of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in northern Nigeria and it is estimated that up to 90% of the population of Arab-Swahili Zanzibar was enslaved. Roughly half the population of Madagascar was enslaved, the Anti-Slavery Society estimated that there were 2,000,000 slaves in the early 1930s Ethiopia, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million

7.
Slavery in ancient Rome
–
Slavery in ancient Rome played an important role in society and the economy. Besides manual labour, slaves performed many services, and might be employed at highly skilled jobs. Accountants and physicians were often slaves, Greek slaves in particular might be highly educated. Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines and their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short. Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood, unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation, torture, and summary execution. Over time, however, slaves gained increased legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters, attitudes changed in part because of the influence among the educated elite of the Stoics, whose egalitarian views of humanity extended to slaves. Roman slaves could hold property which, despite the fact that it belonged to their masters, skilled or educated slaves were allowed to earn their own money, and might hope to save enough to buy their freedom. Such slaves were freed by the terms of their masters will. A notable example of a slave was Tiro, the secretary of Cicero. Tiro was freed before his masters death, and was enough to retire on his own country estate. However, the master could arrange that slaves would only have enough money to buy their freedom when they were too old to work. They could then use the money to buy a new young slave while the old slave, unable to work, Rome differed from Greek city-states in allowing freed slaves to become citizens. After manumission, a slave who had belonged to a Roman citizen enjoyed not only passive freedom from ownership. A slave who had acquired libertas was thus a libertus in relation to his former master, as a social class, freed slaves were libertini, though later writers used the terms libertus and libertinus interchangeably. Libertini were not entitled to public office or state priesthoods. During the early Empire, however, freedmen held key positions in the government bureaucracy, any future children of a freedman would be born free, with full rights of citizenship. Vernae were slaves born within a household or on a farm or agricultural estate. There was a social obligation to care for vernae, whose epitaphs sometimes identify them as such

8.
Slavery in ancient Greece
–
Slavery was a very common practice in Ancient Greece, as in other places of the time. Some ancient writers considered slavery natural and even necessary and this paradigm was notably questioned in Socratic dialogues, the Stoics produced the first recorded condemnation of slavery. Modern historiographical practice distinguishes chattel slavery from land-bonded groups such as the penestae of Thessaly or the Spartan helots, the chattel helot is an individual deprived of liberty and forced to submit to an owner, who may buy, sell, or lease them like any other chattel. The academic study of Slavery in Ancient Greece is beset by significant methodological problems, documentation is disjointed and very fragmented, focusing primarily on Athens. No treatises are specifically devoted to the subject, and jurisprudence was interested in slavery only inasmuch as it provided a source of revenue, comedies and tragedies represented stereotypes while iconography made no substantial differentiation between slaves and craftsmen. The ancient Greeks had several words for slaves, which leads to ambiguity when they are studied out of their proper context. In Homer, Hesiod and Theognis of Megara, the slave was called δμώς / dmōs, the term has a general meaning but refers particularly to war prisoners taken as booty. During the classical period, the Greeks frequently used ἀνδράποδον / andrapodon, as opposed to τετράποδον / tetrapodon, quadruped, or livestock. The most common word is δοῦλος / doulos, used in opposition to free man, the verb δουλεὐω can be used metaphorically for other forms of dominion, as of one city over another or parents over their children. Finally, the term οἰκέτης / oiketēs was used, meaning one who lives in house, other terms used were less precise and required context, θεράπων / therapōn – At the time of Homer, the word meant squire, during the classical age, it meant servant. ἀκόλουθος / akolouthos – literally, the follower or the one who accompanies, also, the diminutive ἀκολουθίσκος, used for page boys. παῖς / pais – literally child, used in the way as houseboy. σῶμα / sōma – literally body, used in the context of emancipation, slaves were present through the Mycenaean civilization, as documented in numerous tablets unearthed in Pylos 140. Two legal categories can be distinguished, slaves and slaves of the god, slaves of the god are always mentioned by name and own their own land, their legal status is close to that of freemen. The nature and origin of their bond to the divinity is unclear, the names of common slaves show that some of them came from Kythera, Chios, Lemnos or Halicarnassus and were probably enslaved as a result of piracy. The tablets indicate that unions between slaves and freemen were common and that slaves could work and own land and it appears that the major division in Mycenaean civilization was not between a free individual and a slave but rather if the individual was in the palace. · There is no continuity between the Mycenaean era and the time of Homer, where social structures reflected those of the Greek dark ages, the terminology differs, the slave is no longer do-e-ro but dmōs. In the Iliad, slaves are mainly women taken as booty of war, in the Odyssey, the slaves also seem to be mostly women

9.
History of slavery in the Muslim world
–
Two rough estimates by scholars of the number of slaves held over twelve centuries in Muslim lands are 11.5 million and 14 million. Under Sharia, children of slaves or prisoners of war could become slaves, Manumission of a slave was encouraged as a way of expiating sins. Many early converts to Islam, such as Bilal ibn Rabah al-Habashi, were the poor, in theory, slavery in Islamic law does not have a racial or color component, although this has not always been the case in practice. Throughout Islamic history, slaves served in social and economic roles. Slaves were widely employed in irrigation, mining, pastoralism, but the most common use was as soldiers, guards, Some rulers relied on military and administrative slaves to such a degree that the slaves were sometimes in the position to seize power. Among black slaves, there were two females to every one male. The Arab slave trade was most active in West Asia, North Africa, in the early 20th century, slavery was gradually outlawed and suppressed in Muslim lands, largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France. However, slavery claiming the sanction of Islam is documented presently in the predominantly Islamic countries of Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Slavery was widely practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia, as well as in the rest of the ancient and early medieval world. The minority were white slaves of foreign extraction, likely brought in by Arab caravaners stretching back to biblical times, native Arab slaves had also existed, a prime example being Zayd ibn Harithah, later to become Muhammads adopted son. Arab slaves, however, usually obtained as captives, were generally ransomed off amongst nomad tribes, the slave population increased by the custom of child abandonment, and by the kidnapping, or, occasionally, the sale of small children. Whether enslavement for debt or the sale of children by their families was common is disputed, free persons could sell their offspring, or even themselves, into slavery. Enslavement was also possible as a consequence of committing certain offenses against the law, two classes of slave existed, a purchased slave, and a slave born in the masters home. Over the latter the master had complete rights of ownership, though slaves were unlikely to be sold or disposed of by the master. Female slaves were at times forced into prostitution for the benefit of their masters, the historical accounts of the early years of Islam report that slaves of non-Muslim masters. Sumayyah bint Khayyat is famous as the first martyr of Islam, Abu Bakr freed Bilal when his master, Umayya ibn Khalaf, placed a heavy rock on his chest in an attempt to force his conversion. A system of labor, much like that which would emerge in the Americas, developed early on. Moreover, the need for labor, in an Islam with large peasant populations, was nowhere near as acute as in the Americas. Slaves in Islam were mainly directed at the service sector - concubines and cooks, the most telling evidence for this is found in the gender ratio, among black slaves traded in Islamic empire across the centuries, there were roughly two females to every male

10.
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire
–
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was a legal and significant part of the Ottoman Empires economy and society. The main sources of slaves were war captives and organized enslavement expeditions in North and East Africa, Eastern Europe and it has been reported that the selling price of slaves fell after large military operations. Enslavement of Caucasians was banned in the early 19th century, while slaves from other groups were allowed, in Constantinople, the administrative and political center of the Empire, about a fifth of the population consisted of slaves in 1609. Sixteenth- and 17th-century customs statistics suggest that Istanbuls additional slave import from the Black Sea may have totaled around 2.5 million from 1450 to 1700, even after several measures to ban slavery in the late 19th century, the practice continued largely unabated into the early 20th century. As late as 1908, female slaves were sold in the Ottoman Empire. Sexual slavery was a part of the Ottoman slave system throughout the history of the institution. A member of the Ottoman slave class, called a kul in Turkish, harem guards and janissaries are some of the better known positions a slave could hold, but slaves were actually often at the forefront of Ottoman politics. The majority of officials in the Ottoman government were bought slaves, raised free, many officials themselves owned a large number of slaves, although the Sultan himself owned by far the largest amount. By raising and specially training slaves as officials in schools such as Enderun. In the mid-14th century, Murad I built an army of slaves, the new force was based on the Sultans right to a fifth of the war booty, which he interpreted to include captives taken in battle. The captive slaves converted to Islam and trained in the personal service. The devşirme system could be considered a form of slavery because the Sultans had absolute power over them, slaves were traded in special marketplaces called Esir or Yesir that were located in most towns and cities. It is said that Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror established the first Ottoman slave market in Constantinople in the 1460s, probably where the former Byzantine slave market had stood. According to Nicolas de Nicolay, there were slaves of all ages, most of the military commanders of the Ottoman forces, imperial administrators, and de facto rulers of the Empire, such as Pargalı Ibrahim Pasha and Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, were recruited in this way. By 1609, the Sultans Kapıkulu forces increased to about 100,000, domestic slavery was not as common as military slavery. On the basis of a list of estates belonging to members of the ruling class kept in Edirne between 1545 and 1659, the data was collected, out of 93 estates,41 had slaves. The total number of slaves in the estates was 140,54 female and 86 male,134 of them bore Muslim names,5 were not defined, and 1 was a Christian woman. Some of these appear to have been employed on farms

The Portuguese presenting themselves before the Manikongo. The Portuguese initially fostered a good relationship with the Kingdom of Kongo. Civil War within Kongo would lead to many of its subjects ending up as enslaved people in Portuguese and other European vessels.

This tablet commemorates the Admiralty's (somewhat belated) apology for the murder of two quarrymen (Alexander Andrews and Rick Flann) and one Blacksmith (William Lano), during an illegal attempt to impress them on the Isle of Portland in Dorset on 2 April 1803. A young lady, Mary Way was also murdered according to a Coroner's inquest. The illegality of the raid was confirmed in the London and local courts

Slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy and …

Whipping scars during a medical examination in 1863 at a Union military camp in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Gordon had escaped from slavery on a Louisiana plantation and gained freedom shortly after reaching the Union camp, later enlisting and serving in the Union Army.

1840 poster advertising slaves for sale, New Orleans. "Valuable Gang of Young Negroes", 17 men and women, to be sold at auction 25 March 1840 at Banks' Arcade.